Gray Swan, an AI security company founded by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, announced a $40 million Series A funding round co-led by Wing Venture Capital and Madrona, with participation from Obvious Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Hudson River Trading, Samsung Next, and existing investor Magarac Venture Partners.
The company, whose AI security platform is used by leading frontier AI developers including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta, plans to use the funding to expand its go-to-market operations, strengthen partnerships with frontier AI labs, and grow its team as demand for AI security solutions accelerates.
Gray Swan was created to help organizations deploy AI systems safely and securely. The company provides tools that assess how AI models and agents may behave in unintended ways and delivers protections designed to prevent those behaviors. Its technology has become a key component of safety evaluation processes used by some of the world’s most advanced AI models before public release.
The company says it has already established relationships with more than 20 customers spanning frontier AI labs and global enterprises. Gray Swan has also formed strategic partnerships with technology providers, including Snowflake. Through that partnership, Gray Swan’s runtime AI protection capabilities integrate directly into Snowflake’s AI ecosystem, enabling customers to incorporate AI security protections where they build and deploy AI applications.
Gray Swan was founded by CEO Matt Fredrikson and Chief Scientist Zico Kolter, who spent more than a decade researching how AI systems fail under adversarial conditions and how those failures can be mitigated. The founders launched the company after recognizing a growing gap between academic AI safety research and the practical tools available to enterprises deploying AI technologies.
The company’s platform consists of three primary components. Cygnal provides real-time monitoring and protection for AI models and agents, allowing organizations to define and enforce security policies. Shade serves as an automated adversarial testing and red-teaming platform that identifies vulnerabilities before deployment. Arena operates as a global AI red-teaming network, bringing together more than 15,000 researchers and security professionals to discover vulnerabilities and generate threat intelligence that strengthens the platform’s defenses.
According to Gray Swan, Arena has produced more than one million real-world attack trajectories, helping the company keep its security models aligned with emerging threats and the latest advances in AI research.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI applications are growing at an unprecedented rate, and at Gray Swan we want to ensure that these deployments can continue without sacrificing reliability and security. We have spent our careers conducting research into the safety of AI systems, and we are putting this into practice to ensure the companies can deploy AI with confidence.”
Zico Kolter, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder, Gray Swan
“As AI agents move into production, accessing enterprise data and making autonomous decisions, runtime security isn’t optional. Gray Swan brings the same adversarial rigor trusted by the leading frontier labs directly into Snowflake, protecting customers where they’re already building.”
Mayank Upadhyay, Chief Security and Trust Officer, Snowflake
“AI is moving faster than any technology we’ve seen, and security hasn’t kept pace. Our mission is to empower the world to use AI safely and securely, and this funding lets us pursue the mission on pace with the frontier. Our partnership with Snowflake is a perfect example: bringing the same security trusted by frontier labs to the platform where enterprises are already building on their data.”
Matt Fredrikson, CEO and Co-Founder, Gray Swan
“Only a handful of security vendors count frontier labs as customers. Gray Swan is even more than that — named in their system cards, embedded in the safety process before the world’s most advanced models go live. Enterprise security teams are now applying that same bar to every AI deployment they run. Gray Swan already sets it.”
Jake Flomenberg, Partner, Wing Venture Capital
“I’ve spent the past few years working alongside the tech leaders who actually have to make AI security decisions — CISOs in our advisory network, hyperscalers, and the frontier labs themselves. I have never heard such a chorus of praise for one company. Gray Swan is the name every group gives you, and the practitioners using the product describe it the same way: years ahead of anything else they’ve evaluated. Matt, Zico, and the team did the research that defined AI security, and they’re now building it into the practical reality the field needs.”
Vivek Ramaswami, Partner, Madrona
